Author: david-althaus

Two variables seem particularly important when trying to make informed choices about how to best shape the long-term future: One’s normative goods-to-bads ratio and one’s expected bads-to-goods ratio. This essay discusses how one could measure these variables and investigates associated challenges.

Will we go extinct, or will we succeed in building a flourishing utopia? Discussions about the future trajectory of humanity often center around these two possibilities, which tends to ignore that survival does not always imply utopian outcomes, or that outcomes where humans go extinct could differ tremendously in how much suffering they contain.